Part 3

Such an instrumentalism seems to analytic realism but a variant of idealism. For it asserts that processes of reflective inquiry play a part in shaping the objects--namely, terms and propositions--which constitute the bodies of scientific knowledge. Now it must not only be admitted but proclaimed that the doctrine of the essays holds that intelligence is not an otiose affair, nor yet a mere preliminary to a spectator-like apprehension of terms and propositions. In so far as it is idealistic to hold that objects of knowledge in their capacity of distinctive objects of knowledge are determined by intelligence, it is idealistic. It believes that faith in the constructive, the creative, competency of intelligence was the redeeming element in historic idealisms. Lest, however, we be misled by general terms, the scope and limits of this "idealism" must be formulated.

(1) Its distinguishing trait is that it defines thought or intelligence by function, by work done, by consequences effected. It does not start with a power, an entity or substance or activity which is ready-made thought or reason and which as such constitutes the world. Thought, intelligence, is to it just a name for the events and acts which make up the processes of analytic inspection and projected invention and testing which have been described. These events, these acts, are wholly natural; they are "realistic"; they comprise the sticks and stones, the bread and butter, the trees and horses, the eyes and ears, the lovers and haters, the sighs and delights of ordinary experience. Thinking is what some of the actual existences do. They are in no sense constituted by thinking; on the contrary, the problems of thought are set by their difficulties and its resources are furnished by their efficacies; its acts are their doings adapted to a distinctive end.

(2) The reorganization, the modification, effected by thinking is, by this hypothesis, a physical one. Thinking ends in experiment and experiment is an actual alteration of a physically antecedent situation in those details or respects which called for thought in order to do away with some evil. To suffer a disease and to try to do something for it is a primal experience; to look into the disease, to try and find out just what makes it a disease, to invent--or hypothecate--remedies is a reflective experience; to try the suggested remedy and see whether the disease is helped is the act which transforms the data and the intended remedy into knowledge objects. And this transformation into knowledge objects is also effected by changing physical things by physical means.

Speaking from this point of view, the decisive consideration as between instrumentalism and analytic realism is whether the operation of experimentation is or is not necessary to knowledge. The instrumental theory holds that it is; analytic realism holds that even though it were essential in getting knowledge (or in learning), it has nothing to do with knowledge itself, and hence nothing to do with the known object: that it makes a change only in the knower, not in what is to be known. And for precisely the same reason, instrumentalism holds that an object as a knowledge-object is never a whole; that it is surrounded with and inclosed by things which are quite other than objects of knowledge, so that knowledge cannot be understood in isolation or when taken as mere beholding or grasping of objects. That is to say, while it is making the sick man better or worse (or leaving him just the same) which determines the knowledge-value of certain findings of fact and certain conceptions as to mode of treatment (so that by the treatment they become definitely knowledge-objects), yet improvement or deterioration of the patient is other than an object of cognitive apprehension. Its knowledge-object phase is a selection in reference to prior reflections. So the laboratory experiment of a chemist which brings to a head a long reflective inquiry and settles the intellectual status of its findings and theorizings (thereby making them into cognitive concerns or terms and propositions) is itself much more than a knowledge of terms and propositions, and only by virtue of this surplusage is it even contemplative knowledge. He knows, say, tin, when he has made tin into an outcome of his investigating procedures, but tin is much more than a term of knowledge.

Putting the matter in a slightly different way, logical (as distinct from naïve) realism confuses means of knowledge with objects of knowledge. The means are twofold: they are (a) the data of a particular inquiry so far as they are significant because of prior experimental inquiries; and (b) they are the meanings which have been settled in consequence of prior intellectual undertakings: on the one hand, particular things or qualities as signs; on the other, general meanings as possibilities of what is signified by given data. Our physician has in advance a technique for telling that certain particular traits, if he finds them, are symptoms, signs; and he has a store of diseases and remedies in mind which may possibly be meant in any given case. From prior reflective experiments he has learned to look for temperature, for rate of heartbeats, for sore spots in certain places; to take specimens of blood, sputum, of membrane, and subject them to cultures, microscopic examination, etc. He has acquired certain habits, in other words, in virtue of which certain physical qualities and events are more than physical, in virtue of which they are signs or indications of something else.

On the other hand, this something else is a somewhat not physically present at the time: it is a series of events still to happen. It is suggested by what is given, but is no part of the given. Now, in the degree in which the physician comes to the examination of what is there with a large and comprehensive stock of such possibilities or meanings in mind, he will be intellectually resourceful in dealing with a particular case. They (the concepts or universals of the situation) are (together with the sign-capacity of the data) the means of knowing the case in hand; they are the agencies of transforming it, through the actions which they call for, into an object--an object of knowledge, a truth to be stated in propositions. But since the professional (as distinct from the human) knower is particularly concerned with the elaboration of these tools, the professional knower--of which the class philosopher presents of course one case--ungenerously drops from sight the situation in its integrity and treats these instrumentalities of knowledge as objects of knowledge. Each of these aspects--signs and things signified--is sufficiently important to deserve a section on its own account.

The position taken in the essays is frankly realistic in acknowledging that certain brute existences, detected or laid bare by thinking but in no way constituted out of thought or any mental process, set every problem for reflection and hence serve to test its otherwise merely speculative results. It is simply insisted that as a matter of fact these brute existences are equivalent neither to the objective content of the situations, technological or artistic or social, in which thinking originates, nor to the things to be known--to the objects of knowledge. Let us take the sequence of mineral rock in place, pig iron and the manufactured article, comparing the raw material in its undisturbed place in nature to the original res of experience, compare the manufactured article to the objective and object of knowledge, and the brute datum to the metal undergoing extraction from raw ore for the sake of being wrought into a useful thing. And we should add that just as the manufacturer always has a lot of already extracted ore on hand for use in machine processes as it is wanted, so every person of any maturity, especially if he lives in an environment affected by previous scientific work, has a lot of extracted data--or, what comes to the same thing, of ready-made tools of extraction--for use in inference as they are required. We go about with a disposition to identify certain shapes as tables, certain sounds as words of the French language, certain cries as evidences of distress, certain massed colors as woods in the distance, certain empty spaces as buttonholes, and so on indefinitely. The examples are trivial enough. But if more complicated matters were taken, it would be seen that a large part of the technique of science (all of science which is specifically "inductive" in character) consists of methods of finding out just what qualities are unambiguous, economical, and dependable signs of those other things which cannot be got at as directly as can the sign-bearing elements. And if we started from the more obscure and complex difficulties of identification and diagnosis with which the sciences of physiology, botany, astronomy, chemistry, etc., deal, we should be forced to recognize that the identifications of everyday life--our "perceptions" of chairs, tables, trees, friends--differ only in presenting questions much easier of solution.

In every case, it is a matter of fixing some given physical existence as a sign of some other existences not given in the same way as is that which serves as a sign. These words of Mill might well be made the motto of every logic: "To draw inferences has been said to be the great business of life. Everyone has daily, hourly, and momentary need of ascertaining facts which he has not directly observed.... It is the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged." Such being the case, the indispensable condition of doing the business well is the careful determination of the sign-force of specific things in experience. And this condition can never be fulfilled as long as a thing is presented to us, so to say, in bulk. The complex organizations which are the subject-matter of our direct activities and enjoyments are grossly unfit to serve as intellectual indications or evidence. Their testimony is almost worthless, they speak so many languages. In their complexity, they point equally in all directions; in their unity, they run in a groove and point to whatever is most customary. To break up the complexity, to resolve it into a number of independent variables each as irreducible as it is possible to make it, is the only way of getting secure pointers as to what is indicated by the occurrence of the situation in question. The "objects" of ordinary life, stones, plants, cats, rocks, moon, etc., are neither the data of science nor the objects at which science arrives.

We are here face to face with a crucial point in analytic realism. Realism argues that we have no alternative except either to regard analysis as falsifying (à la Bergson), and thus commit ourselves to distrust of science as an organ of knowledge, or else to admit that something eulogistically termed Reality (especially as Existence, Being as subject to space and time determinations) is but a complex made up of fixed, mutually independent simples: viz., that Reality is truly conceived only under the caption of whole and parts, where the parts are independent of each other and consequently of the whole. For instrumentalism, however, the alleged dilemma simply does not exist. The results of abstraction and analysis are perfectly real; but they are real, like everything else, where they are real: that is to say, in some particular coexistence in the situation where they originate and operate.

The remark is perhaps more cryptic than enlightening. Its intent is that reflection is an actual occurrence as much so as a thunderstorm or a growing plant, and as an actual existence it is characterized by specific existential traits uniquely belonging to it: the entities of simple data as such. It is in control of the evidential function that irreducible and independent simples or elements exist. They certainly are found there; as we have seen they are "common-sense" objects broken up into expeditious and unambiguous signs of conclusions to be drawn, conclusions about other things with which they--the elements--are continuous in some respects, although discrete with respect to their sensory conditions. But there is no more reason for supposing that they exist elsewhere in the same manner than there is for supposing that centaurs coexist along with domestic horses and cows because they coexist with the material of folk-tales or rites, or for supposing that pigs of iron pre-existed as pigs in the mine. There is no falsifying in analysis because the analysis is carried on within a situation which controls it. The fallacy and falsifying is on the part of the philosopher who ignores the contextual situation and who transfers the properties which things have as dependable evidential signs over to things in other modes of behavior.

It is no reply to this position to say that the "elements" or simples were there prior to inquiry and to analysis and abstraction. Of course their subject-matter was in some sense "there"; and, being there, was found, discovered, or detected--hit upon. I am not questioning this statement; rather, I have been asserting it. But I am asking for patience and industry to consider the matter somewhat further. I would ask the man who takes the terms of logical analysis (physical resolution for the sake of getting assured evidential indications of objects as yet unknown) to be things which coexist with the things of a non-inferential situation, to inquire in what way his independent given ultimates were there prior to analysis. I would point out that in any case they did not pre-exist as signs. (a) Consequently, whatever traits or properties they possess as signs must at least be referred exclusively to the reflective situation. And they must possess some distinguishing traits as signs; otherwise they would be indistinguishable from anything else which happens to be thought of, and could not be employed as evidence: could not be, in short, what they are. If the reader will seriously ask just what traits data do possess as signs, or evidence, I shall be quite content to leave the issue to the results of his own inquiries. (b) Any inquiry as to how the data antecedently exist will, I am confident, show that they do not exist in the same purity, the same external exclusiveness and internal homogeneity, which they present within the situation of inference, any more than the iron which pre-existed in the rocks in the mountains was just the same as the fluxed and extracted ore. Hence they did not exist in the same isolated simplicity. I have not the slightest interest in exaggerating the scope of this difference. The important matter is not its extent or range, but what such a change--however small--indicates: namely, that the material is entering into a new environment, and has been subjected to the changes which will make it useful and effective in that environment. It is trivial to suppose that the sole or even the primary difficulty which an analytic realism has to face is the occurrence of error and illusions, of "secondary" qualities, etc. The difficulty resides in the contrast of the world of a naïve, say Aristotelian, realism with that of a highly intellectualized and analytic disintegration of the everyday world of things. If realism is generous enough to have a place within its world (as a res having social and temporal qualities as well as spatial ones) for data in process of construction of new objects, the outlook is radically different from the case where, in the interests of a theory, a realism insists that analytic determinations are the sole real things.

If it be not only conceded but asserted that the subject-matter generating the data of scientific procedure antedates the procedure, it may be asked: what is the point of insisting so much upon the fact that data exist only within the procedure? Is not the statement either a trivial tautology or else an attempt to inject, sub rosa, a certain idealistic dependence upon thought into even brute facts? The question is a fair one. And the clew to the reply may be found in the consideration that it was not historically an easy matter to reduce the iron of the rocks to the iron which could freely and effectively be used in the manufacture of articles. It involved hitting upon a highly complicated art, but an art, nevertheless, which anyone with the necessary capital and education can command today as a matter of course, giving no thought to the fact that one is using an art constructed originally with vast pains. Similarly it is by art, by a carefully determined technique, that the things of our primary experience are resolved into unquestioned and irreducible data, lacking in inner complexity and hence unambiguous. There is no call for the scientific man in the pursuit of his calling to take account of this fact, any more than the manufacturer need reckon with the arts which are required to deliver him his material. But a logician, a philosopher, is supposed to take a somewhat broader survey; and for his purposes the fact which the scientific inquirer can leave out of account, because it is no part of his business, may be the important fact. For the logician, it would seem, is concerned not with the significance of these or those data, but with the significance of there being such things as data, with their traits of irreducibleness, bruteness, simplicity, etc. Now, as the special scientific inquirer answers the question as to the significance of his special brute facts by discovering other facts with which they are connected, so it would seem that the logician can find out the significance of the existence of data (the fact which concerns him) only by finding out the other facts with which they coexist--their significance being their factual continuities. And the first step in the search for these other facts which supply significance is the recognition that they have been extracted for a purpose--for the purpose of guiding inference. It is this purposeful situation of inquiry which supplies the other facts which give the existence of brute data their significance. And unless there is such a discovery (or some better one), the logician will inevitably fail in conceiving the import of the existence of brute data. And this misconception is, I repeat, just the defect from which an analytic presentative realism suffers. To perceive that the brute data laid bare in scientific proceedings are always traits of an extensive situation, and of that situation as one which needs control and which is to undergo modification in some respects, is to be protected from any temptation to turn logical specification into metaphysical atomism. The need for the protection is sufficiently great to justify spending some energy in pointing out that the brute objective facts of scientific discovery are discovered facts, discovered by physical manipulations which detach them from their ordinary setting.

We have stated that, strictly speaking, data (as the immediate considerations from which controlled inference proceeds) are not objects but means, instrumentalities, of knowledge: things by which we know rather than things known. It is by the color stain that we know a cellular structure; it is by marks on a page that we know what some man believes; it is by the height of the barometer that we know the probability of rain; it is by the scratches on the rock that we know that ice was once there; it is by qualities detected in chemical and microscopic examination that we know that a thing is human blood and not paint. Just what the realist asserts about so-called mental states of sensations, images, and ideas, namely, that they are not the subject-matter of knowledge but its agencies, holds of the chairs and tables to which he appeals in support of his doctrine of an immediate cognitive presentation, apart from any problem and any reflection. And there is very solid ground for instituting the comparison: the sensations, images, etc., of the idealist are nothing but the chairs, tables, etc., of the realist in their ultimate irreducible qualities. The problem in which the realist appeals to the immediate apprehension of the table is the epistemological problem, and he appeals to the table not as an object of knowledge (as he thinks he does), but as evidence, as a means of knowing his conclusion--his real object of knowledge. He has only to examine his own evidence to see that it is evidence, and hence a term in a reflective inquiry, while the nature of knowledge is the object of his knowledge.

Again, the question may be asked: Since instrumentalism admits that the table is really "there," why make such a fuss about whether it is there as a means or as an object of knowledge? Is not the distinction mere hair-splitting unless it is a way of smuggling in a quasi-idealistic dependence upon thought? The reply will, I hope, clinch the significance of the distinction, whether or no it makes it acceptable. Respect for knowledge and its object is the ground for insisting upon the distinction. The object of knowledge is, so to speak, a more dignified, a more complete, sufficient, and self-sufficing thing than any datum can be. To transfer the traits of the object as known to the datum of reaching it, is a material, not a merely verbal, affair. It is precisely this shift which leads the presentative realist to substitute for irreducibility and unambiguity of logical function (use in inference) physical and metaphysical isolation and elementariness. It is this shift which generates the need of reconciling the deliverances of science with the structure and qualities of the world in which we directly live, since it sets up a rivalry between the claims of the data, of common-sense objects, and of scientific objects (the results of adequate inquiry). Above all it commits us to a view that change is in some sense unreal, since ultimate and primary entities, being simple, do not permit of change. No; whatever is to be said about the validity of the distinction contended for, it cannot be said to be insignificant. A theory which commits us to the conception of a world of Eleatic fixities as primary and which regards alteration and organization as secondary has such profound consequences for thought and conduct that a detection of its motivating fallacy makes a substantial difference. No more fundamental question can be raised than the range and force of the applicability to nature, life, and society of the whole-and-part conception. And if we confuse our premises by taking the existential instrumentalities of knowledge for its real objects, all distinctions and relations in nature, life, and society are thereby requisitioned to be really only cases of the whole-and-part nature of things.

The instrumental theory acknowledges the objectivity of meanings as well as of data. They are referred to and employed in reflective inquiry with the confidence attached to the hard facts of sense. Pragmatic, as distinct from sensational, empiricism may claim to have antedated neo-realism in criticism of resolution of meanings into states or acts of consciousness. As previously noted, meanings are indispensable instrumentalities of reflection, strictly coincident with and correlative to what is analytically detected to be given, or irremovably there. Data in their fragmentary character pose a problem; they also define it. They suggest possible meanings. Whether they indicate them as well as suggest them is a question to be resolved. But the meanings suggested are genuinely and existentially suggested, and the problem described by the data cannot be solved without their acknowledgment and use. That this instrumental necessity has led to a metaphysical hypostatizing of meanings into essences or subsistences having some sort of mysterious being apart from qualitative things and changes is a source of regret; it is hardly an occasion for surprise.

To be sure of our footing, let us return to empirical ground. It is as certain an empirical fact that one thing suggests another as that fire alters the thing burned. The suggesting thing has to be there or given; something has to be there to do the suggesting. The suggested thing is obviously not "there" in the same way as that which suggests; if it were, it would not have to be suggested. A suggestion tends, in the natural man, to excite action, to operate as a stimulus. I may respond more readily and energetically to a suggested fire than to the thing from which the suggestion sprang: that is, the thing by itself may leave me cold, the thing as suggesting something else may move me vigorously. The response if effected has all the force of a belief or conviction. It is as if we believed, on intellectual grounds, that the thing is a fire. But it is discovered that not all suggestions are indications, or signifiers. The whale suggested by the cloud form does not stand on the same level as the fire suggested by smoke, and the suggested fire does not always turn out fire in fact. We are led to examine the original point of departure and we find out that it was not really smoke. In a world where skim-milk and cream suggestions, acted upon, have respectively different consequences, and where a thing suggests one as readily as the other (or skim-milk masquerades as cream), the importance of examination of the thing exercising the suggestive force prior to acting upon what it suggests is obvious. Hence the act of response naturally stimulated is turned into channels of inspection and experimental (physical) analysis. We move our body to get a better hold on it, and we pick it to pieces to see what it is.

This is the operation which we have been discussing in the last section. But experience also testifies that the thing suggested is worth attention on its own account. Perhaps we cannot get very readily at the thing which, suggesting flame, suggests fire. It may be that reflection upon the meaning (or conception), "fire," will help us. Fire--here, there, or anywhere, the "essence" fire--means thus and so; if this thing really means fire, it will have certain traits, certain attributes. Are they there? There are "flames" on the stage as part of the scenery. Do they really indicate fire? Fire would mean danger; but it is not possible that such a risk would be taken with an audience (other meanings, risk, audience, danger, being brought in). It must be something else. Well, it is probably colored tissue-paper in strips rapidly blown about. This meaning leads us to closer inspection; it directs our observations to hunt for corroborations or negations. If conditions permitted, it would lead us to walk up and get at the thing in close quarters. In short, devotion to a suggestion, prior to accepting it as stimulus, leads first to other suggestions which may be more applicable; and, secondly, it affords the standpoint and the procedure of a physical experimentation to detect those elements which are the more reliable signs, indicators (evidence). Suggestions thus treated are precisely what constitute meanings, subsistences, essences, etc. Without such development and handling of what is suggested, the process of analyzing the situation to get at its hard facts, and especially to get at just those which have a right to determine inference, is haphazard--ineffectively done. In the actual stress of any such needed determination it is of the greatest importance to have a large stock of possible meanings to draw on, and to have them ordered in such a way that we can develop each promptly and accurately, and move quickly from one to another. It is not to be wondered at then that we not only conserve such suggestions as have been previously converted successfully into meanings, but also that we (or some men at least) turn professional inquirers and thinkers; that meanings are elaborated and ordered in related systems quite apart from any immediately urgent situation; or that a realm of "essences" is built up apart from that of existences.

That suggestion occurs is doubtless a mystery, but so is it a mystery that hydrogen and oxygen make water. It is one of the hard, brute facts that we have to take account of. We can investigate the conditions under which the happening takes place, we can trace the consequences which flow from the happening. By these means we can so control the happening that it will take place in a more secure and fruitful manner. But all this depends upon the hearty acceptance of the happening as fact. Suggestion does not of itself yield meanings; it yields only suggested things. But the moment we take a suggested thing and develop it in connection with other meanings and employ it as a guide of investigation (a method of inquiry), that moment we have a full-fledged meaning on our hands, possessing all the verifiable features which have been imported at any time to ideas, forms, species, essences, subsistences. This empirical identification of meaning by means of the specific fact of suggestion cuts deep--if Occam's razor still cuts.

A suggestion lies between adequate stimulation and logical indication. A cry of fire may start us running without reflection; we may have learned, as children are taught in school, to react without questioning. There is overt stimulation, but no suggesting. But if the response is held off or postponed, it may persist as suggestion: the cry suggests fire and suggests the advisability of flight. We may, in a sense we must, call suggestion "mental." But it is important to note what is meant by this term. Fire, running, getting burned, are not mental; they are physical. But in their status of being suggested they may be called mental when we recognize this distinctive status. This means no more than that they are implicated in a specific way in a reflective situation, in virtue of which they are susceptible of certain modes of treatment. Their status as suggested by certain features of the actual situation (and possibly meant or indicated as well as suggested) may be definitely fixed; then we get meanings, logical terms--determinations.

Words are of course the agencies of fixation chiefly employed, though any kind of physical existence--a gesture, a muscular contraction in the finger or leg or chest--under ready command may be used. What is essential is that there be a specific physical existence at hand which may be used to concrete and hold on to the suggestion, so that the latter may be handled on its own account. Until thus detached and refixed there are things suggested, but hardly a suggestion; things meant, but hardly a meaning; things ideated, but hardly an idea. And the suggested thing until detached is still too literal, too tied up with other things, to be further developed or to be successfully used as a method of experimentation in new directions so as to bring to light new traits.

As data are signs which indicate other existences, so meanings are signs which imply other meanings. I am doubtful, for example, whether this is a man or not; that is, I am doubtful as to some given traits when they are taken as signs or evidences, but I am inclined to the hypothesis of a man. Having such a tentative or conceptual object in mind, I am enabled to explore economically and effectively, instead of at random, what is present, provided I can elaborate the implications of the term "man." To develop its implications is all one with telling its meaning in connection with other meanings. Being a man means, for example, speaking when spoken to--another meaning which need have been no part of "man" as originally suggested. This meaning of "answering questions" will then suggest a procedure which the term "man" in its first meaning did not possess; it is an implication or implied meaning which puts me in a new and possibly more fruitful relation to the thing. (The process of developing implications is usually termed "discourse" or ratiocination.) Now, be it noted, replying to questions is no part of the definition of man; it would not be now an implication of Plato or of the Russian Czar for me. In other words, there is something in the actual situation which suggests inquiring as well as man; and it is the interaction between these two suggestions which is fruitful. There is consequently no mystery about the fruitfulness of deduction--though this fruitfulness has been urged as though it offered an insuperable objection to instrumentalism. On the contrary, instrumentalism is the only theory to which deduction is not a mystery. If a variety of wheels and cams and rods which have been invented with reference to doing a given task are put together, one expects from the assembled parts a result which could not have been got from any one of them separately or from all of them together in a heap. Because they are independent and unlike structures, working on one another, something new happens. The same is true of terms in relation to one another. When these are brought to bear upon one another, something new, something quite unexpected happens, quite as when one tries an acid with which he is not familiar upon a rock with which he is unfamiliar--that is, unfamiliar in such a conjunction, in spite of intimate acquaintance elsewhere. A definition may fix a certain modicum of meaning in the abstract, as we say; it is a specification of a minimum which gives the point of departure in every interaction of a term with other terms. But nothing follows from the definition by itself or in isolation. It is explicit (boringly so) and has no implications. But bring it in connection with another term with which it has not previously interacted and it may behave in the most delightful or in the most disgustingly disappointing way. The necessity for independent terms is made obvious in the modern theory of axioms. It escapes attention in much of the contemporary logic of transitive and non-transitive, symmetrical and non-symmetrical relations, because the terms are so loaded that there are no propositions at all, but only discriminations of orders of terms. The terms which figure in the discussions, in other words, are correlatives--"brother," "parent," "up," "to the right of," "like," "greater," "after." Such terms are not logical terms; they are halves of such terms as "brother-other-offspring-of-the-same-parents"; "parent-child"; "up-down"; "right-left"; "thing-similar-to-another-thing"; "greater-less"; "after-before." They express positions in a determined situation; they are relatives, not relations. They lack implications, being explicit. But a man who is a brother and also a rival in love, and a poorer man than his rival brother, expresses an interaction of different terms from which something might happen: terms with implications, terms constituting a proposition, which a correlative term never does--till brought into conjunction with a term of which it is not a relative. To have called a thing "up" or "brother" is to have already solved its import in some situation. It is dead till set to work in some other situation.

Experience shows, moreover, that certain qualities of things are much more fruitful and much more controllable than others when taken as meanings to be used in drawing conclusions. The term must be of a nature to develop a method of behavior by which to test whether it is the meaning of the situation. Since it is desirable to have a stock of meanings on hand which are so connected that we can move readily from one to another in any direction, the stock is effective in just the degree in which it has been worked into a system--a comprehensive and orderly arrangement. Hence, while all meanings are derived from things which antedate suggestion--or thinking or "consciousness"--not all qualities are equally fitted to be meanings of a wide efficiency, and it is a work of art to select the proper qualities for doing the work. This corresponds to the working over of raw material into an effective tool. A spade or a watchspring is made out of antecedent material, but does not pre-exist as a ready-made tool; and, the more delicate and complicated the work which it has to do, the more art intervenes. These summary remarks will have to pass muster as indicating what a more extensive treatment of a mathematical system of terms would show. Man began by working such qualities as hate and love and fear and beauty into the meanings by which to interpret and control the perplexities of life. When they demonstrated their inefficacy, he had recourse to such qualities as heavy and light, wet and dry, making them into natural essences or explanatory and regulatory meanings. That Greek mediaeval science did not get very far on these lines is a commonplace. Scientific progress and practical control as systematic and deliberate matters date from the century of Galileo, when qualities which lend themselves to mathematical treatment were seized upon. "The most promising of these ideal systems at first were of course the richer ones, the sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising ones were the mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative sterility and failure."

There is no problem of why and how the plow fits, or applies to, the garden, or the watchspring to time-keeping. They were made for those respective purposes; the question is how well they do their work, and how they can be reshaped to do it better. Yet they were made out of physical material; men used ready limbs or roots of trees with which to plow before they used metal. We do not measure the worth or reality of the tool by its closeness to its natural prototype, but by its efficiency in doing its work--which connotes a great deal of intervening art. The theory proposed for mathematical distinctions and relations is precisely analogous. They are not the creations of mind except in the sense in which a telephone is a creation of mind. They fit nature because they are derived from natural conditions. Things naturally bulge, so to speak, and naturally alter. To seize upon these qualities, to develop them into keys for discovering the meanings of brute, isolated events, and to accomplish this effectively, to develop and order them till they become economical tools (and tools upon tools) for making an unknown and uncertain situation into a known and certain one, is the recorded triumph of human intelligence. The terms and propositions of mathematics are not fictions; they are not called into being by that particular act of mind in which they are used. No more is a self-binding reaper a figment, nor is it called momentarily into being by the man who wants to harvest his grain. But both alike are works of art, constructed for a purpose in doing the things which have to be done.

We may say of terms what Santayana so happily said of expression: "Expression is a misleading term which suggests that something previously known is imitated or rendered; whereas the expression is itself an original fact, the values of which are then referred to the thing expressed, much as the honors of a Chinese mandarin are attributed retroactively to his parents." The natural history of imputation of virtue should prove to the philosopher a profitable theme. Even in its most superstitious forms (perhaps more obviously in them than elsewhere) it testifies to the sense of a service to be performed and to a demand for application. The superstition lies in making the application to antecedents and to ancestors, where it is but a shroud, instead of to descendants, where it is a generating factor.

Every reflection leaves behind it a double effect. Its immediate outcome is (as I tried to show earlier) the direct reorganization of a situation, a reorganization which confers upon its contents new increments of intrinsic meaning. Its indirect and intellectual product is the defining of a meaning which (when fixed by a suitable existence) is a resource in subsequent investigations. I would not despise the assistance lent by the words "term" and "proposition." As slang has it, a pitched baseball is to the batter a "proposition"; it states, or makes explicit, what he has to deal with next amid all the surrounding and momentarily irrelevant circumstance. Every statement extracts and sets forth the net result of reflection up to date as a condition of subsequent reflection. This extraction of the kernel of past reflections makes possible a throwing to one side of all the consequences of prior false and futile steps; it enables one to dispense with the experiences themselves and to deal only with their net profit. In a favorite phrase of realism, it gives an object "as if there were no experience." It is unnecessary to descant upon the economy of this procedure. It eliminates everything which in spite of its immediate urgency, or vividness, or weight of past authority, is rubbish for the purpose in hand. It enables one to get down to business with just that which (presumably) is of importance in subsequent procedure. It is no wonder that these logical kernels have been elevated into metaphysical essences.

The word "term" suggests the limiting condition of every process of reflection. It sets a fence beyond which it is, presumably, a waste to wander--an error. It sets forth that which must be taken into account--a limit which is inescapable, something which is to ratiocination what the brute datum is to observation. In classic phrase, it is a notion, that is, a noting, of the distinctions which have been fixed for the purposes of the kind of inquiry now engaged in. One has only to compare the terms of present scientific discourse with those of, say, Aristotle, to see that the importance of terms as instruments of a proper survey of and attack upon existential situations is such that the terms resulting naturally and spontaneously from reflection have been dropped and more effective ones substituted. In one sense, they are all equally objective; aquosity is as genuine, as well as more obvious, a notion as the present chemical conception. But the latter is able to enter a much wider scope of inquiries and to figure in them more prosperously.

As a special class of scientific inquirers develops, terms that were originally by-products of reflection become primary objects for the intellectual class. The "troubles" which occasion reflection are then intellectual troubles, discrepancies within some current scheme of propositions and terms. The situation which undergoes reorganization and increase of comprised significance is that of the subject-matter of specialized investigation. Nevertheless the same general method recurs within it, and the resulting objects--the terms and propositions--are for all, except those who produce them, instruments, not terminal objects. The objection to analytic realism as a metaphysics of existence is not so much an undue formalism as its affront to the commonsense-world of action, appreciation, and affection. The affront, due to hypostatizing terms into objects, is as great as that of idealism. A naïve realism withstands both affronts.

My interest, however, is not to animadvert upon analytic realism. It is to show how the main tenets of instrumental logic stand in relation to considerations which, although ignored by the idealism which was current when the theory received its first formulation, demand attention: the objective status of data and terms with respect to states of mind or acts of awareness. I have tried to show that the theory, without mutilation or torturing, makes provision for these considerations. They are not objections to it; they are considerations which are involved in it. There are questions at issue, but they concern not matters of logic but matters of fact. They are questions of the existential setting of certain logical distinctions and relations. As to the comparative merits of the two schemes, I have nothing to say beyond what has been said, save that the tendency of the analytic realism is inevitably to treat a difference between the logic of inquiry and of dialectic as if it were itself a matter to be settled by the logic of dialectic. I confess to some fear that a philosophy which fails to identify science with terms and propositions about things which are not terms and propositions, will first exaggerate and then misconstrue the function of dialectics, and land philosophy in a formalism like unto the scholasticism from which the older empiricism with all its defects emancipated those who took it to heart.